By the way, this is something that fascinates me about this topic - why do you interpret my experiences one way, and I interpret them another?
Because you seem to have your mind made up with no proof one way or another. I'm trying to be open minded about these types of experiences. "Experts" will write about hypnagogia, or even dreams, but we really don't understand what they are. Consciousness and even reality are not well understood. The real thing with any "visions" is what you get from it. Did anything mean anything to you? Also some people are more sensitive to seeing things.
Now I have never had a dream with grays, or UFOs or anything else in that subject. I have very strange dreams at times, but nothing like that. And my earliest experiences predate all those cultural references. Nor do I have any recollection of an abduction experience. I have posted my various experiences here in the past, but they are always mostly interactions with something unseen. It wasn't until fairly recently that I had the experience with being asked to wrote a book that made me draw a correlation between that experience and what people report as parts of abductions. And this was because of the images I was being shown. And still, I never left the couch I was sitting on, and as far as I know there wasn't any non human entities in my living room. But then I had my eyes closed for the most part.
In regards to abductions, I think it gets back to metaphor. It's all symbolic. The experiences are "real", but the whole medical examination scenario, and even the environment they are in is fabricated for our "benefit". This can easily be demonstrated by looking at past events in human history involving contact with non humans. They might have been seen as "angels" or the Fae, or the Djinn, or what have you. Now they are little gray beings. They might have always looked that way, and the other forms are a facade.
I had an experience when I was about seven years old that for years I just took at face value. Then I thought more about it recently and realized it just wasn't possible. I was outside in my backyard when my attention was drawn towards the sky. There, right above tree top level was a commercial airliner. This would have been in the 60s, so back then they were prop driven and not jets. It was a large four engine plane, and one engine was not running. The propeller was turning very slowly as if from the wind. I could clearly see the windows, and there was a girl about my age waving at me. The plane did not make any noise, or at least was not as loud as it would be if it were that low. I got very excited and ran in to tell my mom. When she came out and it was gone.
Now looking back at it, it makes no sense. So what did I see? I haven't a clue. Remembering this also reminded me that I used to go outside at night with a flashlight and flash it into the sky so planes would flash back at me. Apparently they must have, or I wouldn't have kept doing it, but I can't remember. Once more, what the heck was that all about?
This kind of stuff has been going on for a long time. It cannot be easily explained saying it's all in our mind, and that has the effect of stopping any real research into the matter.
An interesting thing is that young children seem more sensitive to seeing things, and then we grow out of it. My six year old daughter recently told me about a couple of incidents, both of which troubled her. One was hearing a strange voice speaking a language she couldn't understand while laying in bad awake one night. I have heard this same voice once for a fleeting moment. Her other incident was seeing a bunch of "kittens" moving around on the floor of her bedroom.
She said they weren't kittens, but looked like small furry black kittens. She got scared and put the blanket over her head. Now I don't believe she was making up a story or dreaming, because her dreams and stories are quite different from that. They mostly involve dinosaurs!
The small black things reminded me of Terence McKenna's "tykes". In the house where I grew up we had a phantom black cat. You would see it out of the corner of your eye, and then look and it was gone. Sometimes it would appear in front of you when you were walking and you would try to not step on it, but then of course nothing was there. I thought it was odd, but it wasn't until friends started asking if I had a black cat that I took it seriously. I then asked my older brother about it, and he said him and his friends also saw it before I was born. Then I asked my son, who is now 19, and he said he would see it also, but never mentioned it. Then me and a few friends had this phantom big black dog that used to follow my friend Deb around since she as little. We all saw it too. it wold show up in the oddest of places, like jumping out in the road in front of our car.
My point in all this is if you ask enough people if they have had any strange experiences, most will have some stories. It's just that most people don't talk about it. I've been collecting them from people I know, and some are REALLY weird. Like being chased by sticks running as if on stick legs, or having a large noise on the wall talking to you. And these are sane normal people.
It's so common place that it must just be the way things are. But society is "scientific" now, and only material measurable things exist. All the rest is relegated to superstition. But when people keep saying they see something, it would stand to reason that they are seeing something. We can't explain it all away saying they must be mistaken. Maybe reality is glichy?
You do have to be skeptical in the real sense of the word though. For instance I have suffered from migraines since i was a kid, and recently had a scary experience with "scintillating scotoma", where a patch of my field of vision, that started from looking out a window at a bright sunlit day, caused a weird rectangle of spinning triangles and cycling colors. It also prevented me from seeing directly in front of me! I could have attributed it to some paranormal event, but I figured it was associated with a migraine which had not yet started. Not every light in the sky is a UFO.
But at the ripe age of 53, I'm convinced that the world is much stranger than we think. Getting into podcasts like this, and reading up on things, I realize I have had a disproportionately large amount of seemingly paranormal events in my life. And they continue to this day. Many involved other people, and runs the whole gamut from UFOs to poltergeist to things I can't even explain. Then I read about other people with similar experiences.
So psychology isn't the answer, unless we are talking about people who are in constant contact with "space brothers" from Venus.